An ousted friend seeks answers on the road

Much like J.K. Rowling and George R.R. Martin, best-selling author Haruki Murakami is the type of writer whose fans queue up at bookstores at midnight, clamoring to be the first to get their hands on his latest book. Unfortunately, people who do not read Japanese have had to wait quite some time to read Murakami’s latest, Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage, which was published to acclaim in Japan in April 2013.

Well Read Column by Robert Weibezahl

A scan through reviews of Japanese writer Haruki Murakami’s work repeatedly yields such words as “surreal” and “alienation”—and these are certainly apt markers for his much-anticipated new novel, 1Q84. Originally published as a trilogy in Japan, where the first volume sold more than a million copies in just two months, this dystopian epic weighs in at more...

Book Clubs Column by Julie Hale

The celebrated author of The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle and Norwegian Wood offers a surreal coming-of-age novel that features talking cats, a ghost in the guise of Col. Sanders, torrential showers of fish and leeches and last but not least a pair of unlikely protagonists. Kafka Tamura, a 15-year-old runaway, is traveling across Japan in search of his mother and sister. He ends up in the town of...

The surreal life

Japanese author Haruki Murakami's latest offering, Kafka on the Shore, is vast, complex, odd, funny and strangely peaceful: business as usual, but more impressive business than some recent books. It describes two parallel odysseys across space and time (literally), linked by a strange, ambiguous pop tune written by one of the book's mysterious characters. Kafka Tamura, a 15-year-old runaway,...

n October 4, 1957, the Soviet Union launched the first man-made satellite, Sputnik I, into space. It orbited the earth for three months before re-entering the atmosphere and burning up. Widely regarded in the West as a military threat, Sputnik I simply sent a static-laden signal back to earth, each beep heralding the dawn of the space race that would dictate East-West relations for two decades....